We wrapped up our evening by going for a stroll off the Broadway Trailhead, the same place I started and ended my hike yesterday. We both enjoyed the two mile walk beyond the Mica View Picnic Area and back. It was very relaxing and the sunset was beautiful.
“Self Checkouts are awesome!”
We’ve been hearing this from retailers for well over a decade. The epitome of customer convenience, by making the customer do the work of a dedicated store employee, customers can fly through the checkout experience and exit the store faster than OJ can fly through an airport to a car rental company counter. I know, he’s dead now.
In reality, eliminating store employees and having all the customer do the checkout work, retailers thought they’d save tons and tons of money. Somewhere at this moment there’s a big box corporation CEO rolling in their millions of parachute money before Jeff Bezos takes it all away.
Except, here’s the thing. No one wagered on the amount of theft that would occur in the self checkout process. Intentional or not, retailers are losing more money than they anticipated and they are subsequently starting to see the hit to their soaring profits.
This does not amuse the stockholders.
Personally, I never had a problem with self checkouts until they started completely removing the manned checkout lanes altogether. Our local Walmart store did this, for the most part. The customer service counter has been relocated to a legacy-style checkout, and four of the original 30 checkout lanes remain; the rest have all been converted into a corral of self checkouts, where folks can mingle in very close quarters with very large carts and do things like exchange body gases and other COVID-19 transport mechanisms.
We live in such wonderful times.
The Walmart in question robbed their store greeter position to install a receipt checking sentry at the door, but I have always bypassed that person at this particular store. “Sir, I need to see your receipt!”
On the few occasions I have actually heard this I have countered with, “I’m not an employee, no need to check my work”! I then wave my receipt in the air. It might be a car wash receipt or a Starbucks receipt or even something from a Kmart back in 1998. As long it’s printed on chemically dangerous thermal printer that’s going to fade in the Arizona sun within the next couple of months, I don’t think they really care. I’ve been on camera the whole time. They saw me give them a one star rating at the end of the transaction. They shouldn’t ask for my opinion.
Target has been removing self-checkout lanes in their more theft-prone areas because they’re losing too much money and that makes the folks in Minneapolis nervous. Our store hasn’t removed their self checkout corral, but now we’re limited to the number of items we can bring into the corral. Their self checkouts have been converted to “10 items or fewer”.
Luckily, Target still has a dozen or so traditional lanes and usually two or three of them are actually manned.
Here’s a fun tangent. In the very early 1990s I worked for Hills Department Store. I have come to realize that apparently I was one of the few cashiers not stoned at any given time, and that’s probably why they always put me on the express lane. This was before the chain had adopted scanning and we were still keying in the Dept/SKU/Price on every item. The IBM 4683 cash registers felt kind of cheap when compared to the original system from the late 1970s (NCR 255s) but they worked and I could move quickly, even on register 16, which was at the very end of the network loop.
During the Christmas rush, this Hills store would open 15 out of the 16 checkouts and even process regular sales at the nearby jewelry counter. Why 15 out of 16 and not all 16? Because register five was reserved for “administrative duties” by a usually sassy woman named Trish who was dubbed “head cashier”. I really liked Trish, she was a lot of fun. And she could watch everything we were doing, keystroke by keystroke, from register five. The monitoring software has been there for well over 30 years; even the old NCR 255s from the 1970s could monitor the keystrokes of any cash register at any given time.
So I don’t know why I’m suppose to show my receipt to the less than friendly “exiter” at Walmart.
I’m wondering how long it will be before the local Target removes the self checkouts completely. They’re already locking things up like toilet paper and band aids. It’s only a matter of time.
I had a nice stroll around the property this morning. I went for a walk around the neighborhood, well sheltered by the sun, and the exercise was good. By the time I got home I was quite sweaty, even more than when I go hiking on Saturdays.
It was well worth the sweat.
I went for a 9+ mile hike in the April sun in the desert today. I hiked some of my usual stomping grounds in Saguaro National Park East. Here’s a video recap.
The gate preventing the dogs from climbing the stairs to our bedroom has been removed. We have decided the gate is no longer needed.
Truman now keeps watch on the staircase the entire day. Every once in a while he switches position to stay parked in the sun. He’s fluffed his tail up once when the dogs came up to see what’s up, but for the most part he’s been very chill about the whole situation.
I have always loved the midwestern United States. My love for the area goes hand in hand with my love for the Great Plains. I guess I’m just one of the guys that loves rural parts of the country. I’ve been thinking about my upcoming storm chasing trip and exploring towns in these parts of the country. It got me thinking about my first time in Iowa. Surprisingly, my blog is well over 20 years old and it turns out I wrote about the experience.
I mentioned that on Tuesday I flew home from a visit with our friends Jeff and Mark in North Carolina. I was delighted to see on check in that I was upgraded to First Class on the second leg of the trip; IAH Houston to TUS Tucson on a Boeing 737-900. We shall disregard the gate agent who said my luggage was going to Tulsa. It didn’t.
It’s no secret that I enjoy flying First Class, even in the very first row in seat 1A with no storage in front of me, sitting next to an old broad who flipped on Fox News as soon as possible and would gasp every once in a while during her viewing experience with something called Gutfeld courtesy of DirecTV. I was thankful for her complimentary ear buds.
I opted for the chicken dish and a glass of sparkling wine for my dinner selection.
The mashed potatoes were bordering on soup, and the presentation was a little dicey, but as we bounced around the sky I ate my First Class meal and I was grateful for perks such as this.
You’re never in a place where you shouldn’t be grateful.
The old broad watching something called Gutfeld screamed COBB SALAD without taking out her ear buds when the flight attendant was taking our dinner requests. She also had some sparkling water.
Perhaps she needed a glass of sparkling wine to go with her ear buds.
I’ve taken my next step in my video editing adventures and purchased an M2 Pro Mac mini. I bumped up the GPU on this machine so I could have as much graphics processing goodness as my budget would allow. Apple told me it’d be here on Monday; it arrived today.
It’s a very capable little machine that flies along nicely.
My M2 MacBook Air still does a fantastic job and its duties and will be my go to machine for my day to day stuff. And I have always found the MBA to be quite fast. This new Mac mini blows that performance a bit out of the water.
I know Apple should have an M3 Mac mini coming out soon, but I wasn’t in the mood to wait around for it. For what I am using this computer for, I am more than happy with my purchase.
Strap yourself in for some video goodness. Less than a month until my storm chasing adventure!
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!
